How To Use Ecommerce To Make Money

How To Use E commerce To Make Money

Building an e-commerce website is not like a walk in the park. But in today’s time setting up an e-commerce site as well as launching and maintaining it so entrepreneurs, designers and creators can sell and showcase their products easier than it ever has been.

All online businesses that caters services, funds and, sending out goods over the internet run the spectrum and scope, from big and powerful retailers like the Amazon up to the crafting sites.

Online shopping is one of the many areas that has grown extensively over the past years. In 2015 there were over 1.2 billion digital buyers and has been continuously growing up to this time.

Depending on the kind of business that you are building it might be more practical to consider to

Start the e-commerce side of your company before building a physical business and deal with your customers face to face. However, there are some differences in the approach to build an e-commerce site versus to a traditional business.

Building trust is very important in e-commerce, simply because people are not seeing you physically. They could be skeptical about you. Thankfully, blogs and social media were born and they made it easier than ever before to build the trust that you need.

First thing before you build trust with your future clients and having all the permits and paperwork s filled and make sure that you’re in compliant with all the necessary agencies, the same as you would do with a traditional business in a physical location.

Starting an E commerce Site

In starting an e-commerce website, there are some basic bureaucratic hoops and procedures to follow through like the following below:

• Select and register a business name.

• Securing a domain name and website—a company and a website should have named to go with them.

• Selecting carefully the business structure that is the most suitable for your needs which includes partnership, sole proprietor, corporation or LLC.

• Getting an Employer Identification Number (EIN), necessary even for businesses with no employees.

• Getting business permits and licenses, operating any online business, you still need to pay sales tax or home business licenses.

At this point, traditional businesses can go off and work on securing real estate or a commercial space for their business. E commerce site owners, on the other hand, need to start building their online presence.

Make It Easy to Use

There are many factors to consider in building your own e-commerce site. One important thing that you should consider is making your site easy to use. Make it simple for the customers to follow through while in your website and doing any transactions with you. Luckily, there are certain platforms that you can use to refine the process of selling and shipping. In present, e-commerce sites opt to use the four main services which are Shopify, WooCommerce, SquareSpace Commerce and Magento. These platforms are more usable and secure to use and their services help business owners in creating their online stores and facilitating purchases.

You can use as WordPress plugins and add to your website the WooCommerce, Shopify and Magento, while SquareSpace helps you create a new site from scratch.

Below are the details and different packages from each of the four platforms:

• WooCommerce

Free to download, this plugin has free themes for use but additional premium themes start at $39. There are additional extensions that range from free to $249. Some technological knowledge required.

• SquareSpace Commerce

SquareSpace Commerce comes with two e-commerce levels which is 1. Basic which costs $30/month (or $26/month if billed annually) or 2. Advanced which costs $80/month ($70/month if billed annually). There is no any technological knowledge required.

• Magento

Magento is an open-source framework. It requires a lot of technical knowledge, but don’t worry because it has an free Community Edition or if you want something more complex Enterprise solution which costs $18,000 a year.

• Shopify

Shopify is user-friendly and can be easily integrate. It offers four plans, ranging from Lite at $9/month to Unlimited at $179/month.

Prepare for the Rising Costs

Take note of some additional fees when choosing an e-commerce builder. Rising of costs is unavoidable but some are worth investing in. Shopify and other services might give an additional percentage on purchases if you let customers pay by credit card. Usually it is between 1-5 % of transaction fees are being charged additionally based on volume.

There are other costs outside of the shop like the cost of hosting in blog and email marketing software, which increases based on the number of subscribers. Using a blog and having a blog site with related content is a great way to funnel traffic to your site, it also well increase the SEO ranking of both and make your brand more prominent.

You might also consider incorporating customer relationship management tools, like phone, email or chat customer service, in order to both help and retain existing customers and convert visitors into paying customers.

Sharing Is The Key in Starting an E commerce Site: Share, Share and more Sharing

Blogging and social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat is helpful in spreading your presence especially if you are just starting up. This kind of early marketing is free and can be used to drop hints and build excitement about upcoming launches or product reveals.

Cross-Pollinate Your E commerce Platform

Diversify. Small business owners that have their own site but also sell through Amazon—often seen as a competitor—are simply covering every corner of the market. It is important no matter how small or big the percentage that you will get because some people only shop on Amazon.

Selling on a larger market outlet can mean a lot of benefit like you can test on your products if it will be ad popular as how you see it or predicted, you can have a lower shipping rates if you use Fulfillment by Amazon enough, and you can take advantage of the built-in trust factor that often facilitates purchasing by customers on Amazon. Many consumers are cautious when they do online shopping but an Amazon-vetted seller are already trusted by them to fulfill their orders on time.

Maintaining your own store and vision is paramount to building an e-commerce store, but don’t rule out using larger platforms to help elevate your sales and brand name.

Conclusion

The advantages of having to start an e-commerce business are plenty than starting a traditional one. Here are some few of them:

• You don’t need a big capital, the initial investment is much lower, it can be as tricked out or low-key as you’d like.

• You can take advantage of the luxury of operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and for customers all over the country (or the world, if you’re willing to ship that far).

• If you need to expand, the cost of operations is much easier and less costly.

To make your e-commerce successful, there are important steps to take and investments to make. Even though you’re running your business online, treat it like any other— be compliant with tax laws, have all the necessary permits, give importance to your customers and communicate with them, and build a mobile-friendly platform. Because big part of your sales will mostly to come through mobile devices and you will absolutely be ahead over your competitors who don’t use mobile platforms.